Military couples reconsider future after catastrophic war injuries

MICHAEL E. RUANEThe Washington Post

Published Thursday, June 01, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A few weeks after an explosion tore off his legs and part of his right arm, Army Sgt. Joseph Bozik felt the time had come to tell his girlfriend she no longer was bound by their plans for marriage.

He asked his mother to leave his hospital room at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and addressed his girlfriend, Jayme Peters. "Be completely honest with me," he said. "If you want to go home, that's fine."

As she broke into tears, Bozik said he'd be OK, and he would completely understand. He knew she had not bargained for a husband like this.

Along with its impact on bodies and minds, the war in Iraq has deeply affected military marriages and relationships. It has presented some young couples with the age-old choice: to wed before departure to the front or wait until homecoming. And it has forced married couples to endure long, repeated separations.

But experts say the hardest challenge can be when a spouse or lover comes home catastrophically injured.

Couples have had to face reunions in which the returning soldier or Marine has lost one, two or three limbs, has been disfigured or paralyzed, or has suffered a permanent, debilitating brain injury.

The couple must re-examine the foundations on which their relationship is built, experts say. The two might have to accept new roles, in which the spouse may be the chief breadwinner and caregiver. And the injured service member may feel like less of a person and wonder if he or she is still really loved.

Kay Eady, 50, a teacher from Albany, Ga., said she often tells her husband, Clarence, 41, who is recovering at Walter Reed from the loss of a leg in Iraq: "You're more a man to me now -- for someone to go through that and come out smiling."

But Michael J. Wagner, director of Walter Reed's medical family assistance center, said he once heard a spouse say in front of her injured husband: "How can I deal with this? He's not even a whole man anymore."

One young soldier recuperating from a double amputation at Walter Reed said recently that his war injuries were the last blow for his four-year marriage. He said his wife already was unhappy with his two tours in Iraq.

Speaking anonymously because he is in the midst of a divorce, he said she left the hospital partway through his recovery, telling his mother she was not coming back.

"That was rough," he said. "I got on the phone to her and talked to her and cried. ... I was like, 'I got nobody.' That was the hardest thing. If she had just stuck it out a little longer."

Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced 424 amputees, according to a Walter Reed spokesman, and 459 traumatic brain injuries have been treated at the Naval hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Steven Tice, a veteran trauma counselor who lost an arm and a shoulder in Vietnam in 1970, said it also is possible for the challenge of a major war injury to enrich a marriage in the long term.

"I think it can be a key to a thriving marriage," he said in a recent telephone interview. If a couple can come out of such a calamity "with compassion for each other, and assist each other in negotiating the planet, you've got some healthy individuals."